A New Quality: Family Farm & Home has brought the Fansler family together in retailing

Kendra Stanley-Mills | ChronicleFamily Farm & Home president Al Fansler, center, sits in the new retail store along with his son, Tim Fansler, Family Farm vice president of merchandising, left, and his son-in-law, Bob Tarrant, who is Family Farm's vice president of finance. The new Family Farm & Home store will open April 28 in the former Orchard Foods building at 2301 Holton Road in Dalton Township. The grand opening will be May 7.

Editor's note: This is the fourth of four parts of the story of Family Farm & Home's quiet growth into what could become a major Muskegon-based company. The full story will run in Sunday's Muskegon Chronicle.

MUSKEGON — “Family” is the link that ties together the former Quality Stores Inc. and a growing farm store retailer that has made a major commitment to Muskegon.

Quality Stores — a Muskegon-based, national farm store retail leader — was a creation of the Hilt family. And now Family Farm & Home is being put together by the Fansler family.

It was that “family” feel of the Quality Stores that former employee Tim Tonjes didn't want to give up when he created a Facebook page a little more than a year ago.

Tonjes wanted to keep up with old friends and colleagues from Quality after the 2001 bankruptcy. The Facebook page has 163 followers.

“Quality was an excellent employer,” said Tonjes, who lives near Defiance, Ohio, and worked in the Quality stores as a team leader in Defiance and Bryan, Ohio. “There are few like that today. Out motto was: 'Where customers prefer to shop, employees prefer to work and vendors prefer to do business.'”

• Saturday: Family Farm & Home has brought the Fansler family together in retailing

Quality Stores was founded by brothers Jack and George Hilt, with their first store in Hudsonville. The company settled in Muskegon and grew to 112 stores in the eastern United States with annual sales of $525 million at the time it merged with Central Tractor Farm & Country of Iowa in 1999.

The merger deal was put together by Fenway Partners Capital Fund of New York and J.W. Childs Equity Partners of Boston. Besides Quality and Central Tractor, the investment banker also obtained the Country Store chain to piece together the largest farm store retail chain in the nation.

The remaining farm store retailer of the “big four” was Nashville-based Tractor Supply. It eventually took many of the Quality locations, including the store at 1550 Whitehall Road, growing into a 1,000-store chain national chain today.

Al Fansler was a Quality Stores president at the time of the merger and chief operating officer of newly-merged company. He left Quality before the bankruptcy, eventually forming Family Farm & Home with his son, Tim, and son-in-law, Bob Tarrant.

Fansler said Quality's eventual demise was the result of too much debt incurred by putting the three companies together, bad management decisions and a different culture between the Muskegon and Iowa operations.

Tarrant said he and Tim Fansler are learning the lessons of Al Fansler's nearly 40 years of retail experience.

“Al has taught Tim and I that it is all about leadership,” Tarrant said of Family Farm. “You have to train and empower your people to be leaders. One or two people can't do it all.”

No doubt that the “family” tradition will be passed from the 60-year-old Al Fansler to his 40 year-old son and 37 year-old son-in-law. For the next generation, it will be all about Michigan, where another dozen small-town communities would make excellent locations for Family Farm stores, they said.

“It's where we live and who we are,” Tarrant said about Michigan and the retail company.